Category: Links and Quotes Page 17 of 25

Shared from elsewhere.

What I Learned From Pro-Gun Twitter

On January 7, 2016

When I wrote about President Obama’s Executive Order about guns I specifically wasn’t trying to change anyone’s mind. There’s a reason for this. I am not trying to strip my opponents of their identities. Guns are their identities.

Jenny Trout posted a single tweet. My child is more important than your gun.

The replies are what you expect. Threats against her. Threats if she tries to come and take their guns. Fear. Yes, she picked the replies but what she posted was indicative of what happens when anyone says something even remotely about guns control online. Remember, this started with her saying my child is more important than your gun. She’s not coming to take them away. It’s not a pro-gun-control message. It’s a mother’s statement that her child is precious.

But she hits upon some truths I think we overlook when trying to have a debate about guns in this country.

The pro-gun right has one weapon, and that is fear. If they can’t make you fear “terrorists”, they’ll try to make you fear “thugs”. If they can’t make you fear “thugs”, they’ll jump to the hypothetical rape of your pretty white daughter. If they can’t make you afraid at all, they’ll become violently afraid of you. Then they’ll kill you, and say it was in self-defense because you tried to take their guns. Self-defense, because their guns are their selves. That’s why they’re panicking; if the government legislates their guns away, they’re legislating these peoples’ identities away.

For a group who uses fear as its main tactic, fear is at the heart of the issue. They see gun control as an attack on their guns which they view as part of their identity. Their guns are their selves. That’s why the government is so scary. It’s threatening to remove part of their identities. How do you even begin a discussion that starts with wanting to remove part of someone’s identity?

Update

Richard makes a great point. We need to deal with The Anger before we deal with The Gun.

The Anger is in all of us. The Anger manifests itself differently in each person, to different degrees. The Anger can be eased, it can be released safely, but it never goes away. You have to be taught how to deal with The Anger, but few people ever learn on their own. Fewer still know how to teach it. Instead, we try to sublimate The Anger, hide it, pretend it doesn’t exist. But it doesn’t go away. Without a way to acknowledge The Anger, to release it in a safe way, The Anger explodes, increasingly in a hail of gunfire.

The Anger feeds on the Fear. The result is a much darker version of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch.

The Setup / Michelle Vandy

By Carl

On October 14, 2015

In Links and Quotes

I’ve written about The Setup before. But today’s entry made me look further. It features Brand Designer Michelle Vandy. She designs with her nose.

Michelle Vandy

Here’s her setup:

The last few years my arms have largely shaped my work setup. I used to struggle with severe pains and cramps in my lower arms and couldn’t design unless I had my special equipment. Basically I assembled a device from a Manfrotto Table Top Tripod Kit 209, 492 Long, tripod adapter plate and an Apple Magic Trackpad and placed it in front of my 15 inch MacBook Pro. I then used the tip of my nose to draw and maneuver the mouse, while my arms were resting in front of me. Yes, it was pretty frustrating at times and yes, it looked ridiculous and yes, it took a long time to increase my precision and speed, but somehow I ended up becoming extremely efficient!

Check out her site with a great domain name. She has full details on the hardware, photos and video of her using the setup in action.

Apollo 7 Hasselblad image from film magazine 4/N - Earth Orbit - https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/21322829193/in/album-72157657129869694/

Apollo Three Ways

By Carl

On October 13, 2015

In Links and Quotes

Recently, NASA released photos from the Apollo missions. This is a treasure trove of 13,911 photos.

The photos themselves are wonderful to be able to see through the eyes and cameras of the astronauts. The photos are the originals without any post-processing or color correction. Which means someone took it upon themselves to do so.

NASA Apollo Images : Exposure & Color Corrected | Light And Matter

Unfortunately, the scans have not been corrected for color and exposure, so they tend to be flat and tinted. For those of you who like the Instagram-filter look, they’re just fine; it does add a bit of vintage charm. My instinct, though, is to repair them… to try to give them them accurate color and the crispness of a full-tonal range.

There are just a few of the more interesting photos with a before/after color correction applied to them. It gives new life to the photos.

And we couldn’t stop there.

Apollo Missions on Vimeo

I was looking through the Project Apollo Archive (flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/) and at one point, I began clicking through a series of pics quickly and it looked like stop motion animation. So, I decided to see what that would look like without me having to click through it. Enjoy!

Sit back and enjoy almost three minutes of frantic space exploration.

Header image: Apollo 7 Hasselblad image from film magazine 4/N – Earth Orbit

The Cost of Paying Attention

By Carl

On September 16, 2015

In Links and Quotes

I don’t know what to make of the world anymore. I don’t know where to direct my pain and my exhaustion. Everyday there’s something new to be horrified over. Everyday there’s some new terror to fear.

There are days I wish for the times before I was connected with the entire world. Before I knew of the hates and pains suffered by everyone all across the country, and the globe. Do I need to know of all this pain? Do I need to unplug and go back to a simpler time? I was thinking about this when I came across
The Cost of Paying Attention in The New York Times

Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it. And yet we’ve auctioned off more and more of our public space to private commercial interests, with their constant demands on us to look at the products on display or simply absorb some bit of corporate messaging. Lately, our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed. And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think.

I think about this everyday. When I encase myself with headphones and tune out the people on the train, and the constant talking at work.

Silence is now offered as a luxury good.

Luxury cars are sold with silence as a feature. The article talks about the luxury lounges in airports being an oasis of calm and quiet. It’s a world where the demands on our attention have never been higher. The talking never stops. The demands to engage and be sold to never go away. Silence is bliss.

I grew up in the country. I woke to mooing cows and crowing roosters. I couldn’t see another house from my own. We had green fields and tall trees surrounding our property. Now I live in a city. I live in a townhouse. I don’t even have four walls to myself.

But it’s not the noise that drives me mad. It’s the light. All hours of the day and night, bright lights piercing the darkness. The blazing lights penetrate my bedroom windows to illuminate a park, closed at dark.

But it’s never dark there. It’s as bright as daylight all night long at that park. I don’t know why we pay to keep the lights on all night long. Recently, the home owner’s associate replaced the lights with brighter bulbs. So now the night is even brighter and closed to daylight.

I still can’t explain why. I can’t understand why the light is required at night. When did the dark become such a terrible thing? I miss the night. I miss the dark. I miss the quiet.

Therapy beyond speech

By Carl

On July 8, 2015

In Links and Quotes

Being a therapist is hard work. Working as an art or music therapist is doubly hard because in addition to doing hard work, you’re constantly having to explain, evangelize and defend your work to people who have no idea what you do. ms. kris neel wrote a great post with Music Therapy info. She writes:

What is Music Therapy?

The official website for the American Music Therapy Association cites that “Music Therapy is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program.”

All of these factors set us apart from other musical services offered such as recreational music or music performance, so it’s important that we understand what that definition actually mean.

…

Music interventions and individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship: Music therapists don’t just pick a song and something fun to do with it. Each client has goals that are specific to their strengths and needs, and their music therapist will choose music interventions (based on the research!) to assist the client in reaching those goals in a safe and motivating environment. Just because it looks like fun and games doesn’t mean that’s, in fact, what it is.

She includes a couple of links to music therapy in action. I had no idea Gabby Giffords’ recovery was due in large part to Neurologic Music Therapy. I remember the story of Dilbert creator Scott Adams regaining his voice through speaking in rhyme. (Original link is dead.) Each one of us has an extremely powerful relationship to music. A song can teleport me back into a specific point in my past. I have strong associations with music and my history. Music is medicine. The TED talks Kris linked too were enlightening. She fights a good and important fight.

My wife faces this same struggle. She is an art therapist and has the same problem with people not knowing what she does. Or thinking she’s an art teacher.

She specializes in working with seniors with dementia. It’s a specialized but growing population that often gets overlooked. She chose to work with them and has focused her efforts on understanding them and tailoring her efforts to getting them involved and to stimulating their minds. In her words, “I help people use art as a way to express themselves or deal with the challenges of life.”

The goals of therapy can be different depending on who is getting the therapy and it’s a vital profession. But one that is badly misunderstood especially once you branch out from the image people have in their heads of Dr. Freud and a patient lying on a couch.

Traditional therapy cannot work for everyone. There are entire populations of people who cannot speak and tell you what they’re feeling, specifically children and the elderly with dementia.

To reach them, you need to use other therapeutic techniques such as art or music therapy. Since what do you do is the first question most people ask upon meeting, I’ve listened to my wife explain, again, what it is that she does. And no, she is not an art teacher.

I’m sure Kris gets tired of repeating herself and hopefully by now she has the “elevator pitch” of what she does. It’s a line you’ll be using a lot.